Indie Rock Ice Cream Social

8:30 p.m. Friday, July 10. The Firebird, 2706 Olive Street.

Details

$10. $3 minor surcharge. 314-535-3535.

Time was, ice-cream socials were only found in church halls and grade-school gymnasiums. But why should sharing sweet treats and fellowship be confined to such buttoned-down environments? At least that's the impetus behind the Indie Rock Ice Cream Social, an event that features guitar-driven rock, country and chamber-pop music as well as delicious (and free!) ice cream. The Champaign, Illinois, quintet Elsinore, with its dreamy hooks and hard-driving melodicism, headlines the four-band bill. Local quartet Via Dove prefers shoegaze's hazy atmospherics to Elsinore's square-shouldered pop dynamics, but both acts share a love of turn-on-a-dime rock & roll dynamics. The Dive Poets has been playing around town for about a year, and in that time, the quintet's combination of country's signifiers and pop harmonics has become more refined. The dozen or so members of Lost in the Trees are already fairly refined — the Chapel Hill, North Carolina, band frames guitarist and singer Ari Picker's fragile and frantic songs with strings, low brass and accordions.